Awesome

For a brand-new bleeding edge demo application using the currently in development vlcj-5.0.0 and LibVLC 4.0.0, switch to the 5.x development branch.

vlcj-javafx-demo

Demo showing how vlcj can be used to render video to a JavaFX Canvas.

The new JavaFX PixelBuffer is used to avoid a full-frame buffer copy, this is the strongly recommended approach.

See:

With the PixelBuffer the native video buffer is directly shared with JavaFX thereby avoiding full-frame copies for each video frame.

Performance is really good with PixelBuffer. This solution is likely to outperform the Swing/Java2D implementation and likely may be the best approach for a cross-platform media player (even on OSX, which has not supported the optimal embedded solution for a long time now.)

GPU Support

GPU support even for modern video cards is pretty poor in JavaFX under Java7.

nVidia cards seem to be better supported at the moment.

If your video card is not supported then JavaFX will fall back to a software renderer. This will hobble your video playback performance.

Java8 seems much better - i.e. some modern mainstream AMD graphic cards seem better supported. Under Java8 this sample application is working fine with a Radeon HD 7700 series video card on Linux. It of course works a lot better with an nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, also tested on Linux.

Java/JavaFX Versions

This example project now requires JDK 11 and at least JavaFX 13 (for the new PixelBuffer).

Note that it is still possible in your own projects to use some of the other examples in this project on JDK 1.7 or earlier versions of JavaFX if you need to support that.

Notes

Contemporary versions of JavaFX provide a SwingNode so that it is possible to embed Swing components inside a JavaFX scene - so why not use this for vlcj?

Well, vlcj still would require a heavyweight AWT Canvas, and heavyweight components do not work with the SwingNode component.

So whichever way you look at it, you're stuck with direct rendering, as per the test cases provided by this project.

What might be an option for you is to go the otherway, using Swing/AWT for your vlcj video window and embedding a JavaFX scene inside your Swing application.

Memory Profile

Using the standard JVM settings (default garbage collector):

This test case plays a DVD ISO.

I can't really explain the behaviour of the garbage collector, it seems erratic and to change behaviour over time.

Nevertheless, there is clearly no memory leak, and it can run consistently in under 100Mb of heap memory.